Mahima Roy

Comedy Drama

4.0  

Mahima Roy

Comedy Drama

When Bond Came To Aid

When Bond Came To Aid

13 mins
182


“Life is too short to read bad books. Write a bad one instead. Because my work will still be good to me. A home-cooked meal rarely causes acidity.”

I struggled with the jammed zip lock of my massive bag. I pulled it till the tips of my little fingers bulged like the red tip of fireflies. And, I pinched myself.

“Aah-Ouch!” As I pulled back my careless hand, it hit a masked passenger in the queue, whose eyes looked familiar. Before I could place his familiarity, I leaned back. I noticed that I had been blocking the check-in passage for a long list of agitated passengers behind me.

Part of me wanted to sit right there till I fixed my problem. Instead, my non-dramatic ideal dragged the clumsy, half-opened, 10 kg baggage aside. I sat on the bag as my subconscious filtered the boarding announcements, thankfully not for my flight.

“Careful! You might break something,” the man with familiar eyes said, now taking off his mask. I looked up and said, “I won’t. The bag has some of my Nani’s saris and late Nana’s coats for my parents. He passed away this year.” I recognised the man. A little too well.

“Hey, you were right there at the workshop…now...I am bad with names…it was…uh,” he said, clicking his fingers.

“I know. Aranya,” I said. “You’re going to Kolkata too?” I said, blowing my gum.

“No, I’m heading to Mumbai.”

I looked at my watch. “You’re too early for the next flight.”

“Actually, you’re late,” he smirked.

My gum burst on my lips. I bit it, trying hard not to reply. I felt the same surge of nervousness that this man made me feel during the workshop. I avoided. Instead, I looked around for a way to seal my sentimental treasure. After all, my boarding could start anytime soon.

I took bobby pins from my neatly tied bun. I inserted two pins on two zips each and pulled them close to each other. Slowly and steadily, the zip moved closer, hoping that at least from one end, the chain would seal. I was so attentive that I could hear my chewing synchronise with my heartbeat. 

“Tut-tut,” he made an annoying sound to gesture to the local employee and took a nylon cable tie from him, like the one we find in supermarkets. It broke my concentration. Doing that to a Brahmin in ancient times would be considered a sin. “You’re trying too hard,” he told me, “Try this.” He pulled the bag from me.

The two zips were still far from each other like two cars on either end of the finishing line. Yet, he crashed the cars. Rohit Shetty must be his favourite director, except I wondered if he saw the zips as cars. As soon as he knit the cable tie through the zip, the chain that seemed closed so far popped open behind “ZAAAAAP!”

I felt my honour stripping like someone had dragged down the zip of my jeans on purpose. My patient efforts were like an amateur chef chopping an onion in the correct proportion for the first time, and now the onion made me cry. With this cable tie, I couldn’t pull the chain back and forth to smoothen its jam. I tried chewing it off as I did at markets when I lost the bill somewhere in my bag, but in vain, like every time.

“Uh, sorry. I thought the cable would be a good way to bring the chain closer.” I heard a whisper as if he had read the analogies my mind muttered. I pinched the zip hopelessly hoping they would magically stitch. If only I had a sewing kit. “Do you have a sewing kit?” I asked him.

“I am a guy. Why would I have a sewing kit?” he said.

A corner of my lip lifted at his answer. I could definitely expect that from a middle-aged man who fed tea to his white jacket. This happened thrice in the span of our three-day workshop. To be in a journey-ship, I recommend replacing one-night stands with three-day stands.

I stood up to take a look at my purse. As I turned, he pulled out a sticker off my thigh. “What was it?” I jumped.

“No flammable substance inside,” he mocked. He pasted the sticker on the zip, but it fell out.

“I got it!!” I said, searching my purse, “All I need is something sticky.” I took out a comb and a notebook and threw them on him.

“Try sticking yourself then,” he said.

I stick out the tasteless gum through my clenched teeth. “How about I stick this?”

“You’re disgusting,” he said, fiddling with my blank notebook. The lone first page had a small scribble that said, “Dear Roshnee, travel a lot. Love, Arjun.”

“I wrote this, I remember,” he said.

“You don’t remember. It’s because your writing is only legible to you,” I said.

“You said your name was Aranya.”

“You remember nothing, don’t you, Arjun? You don’t even remember your own stories at times,” I said, disappointed now, “That was for a friend. Remember, I told you she was a fan?”

“Oh…yes…” he said. He was standing next to me now as I still looked for something sticky in my purse. “And you?”

“And you what?”

“You’re not a fan?”

I scoffed. “Arjun, I was the only one to bring you a gift. I agree you kept the mask I stitched, the bookmark I painted, the edit I made, the note I wrote, but the book? You kept it in the library. A random library you’re never going to visit again because you said it – this was your first and last workshop.”

“I…I had already read it. And I love that book so, I want others to read it too.”

“But it was for you. I am a no-one and still have 6 copies of Jane Eyre because people know I love that book. I am glad I chose something you already like and isn’t that even better?”

“Aranya, I am not a gift person. Giving a gift is in your control, then what happens to it is not in your control.”

“You shouldn’t be allowed on flight considering your speech is itself a sharp object.” He was right but if a production house had sent him this gift, he would have flaunted it on social media.

I wasn’t sure if it was his words or the cold surroundings that made me shudder. My cold hands snatched the notebook from him without breaking the painful eye contact. He looked away.

“There’s sari in the bag and no safety pins?” he said, his eyes departing.

I didn’t pay attention. Instead, I took out my stationery box where I found what would work for me - glue. Both looked at the zip. Arjun pressed the glue tube as I rubbed it on my tips. I blew steam of air to dry it on the edge of the zip.

“What if it’s permanent?” he asked, concerned.

“I’ll cut the glue using scissors when I get back then.”

Glue was a decent measure but the one I had wasn’t sticky enough. I needed something a little stickier. I pressed the zip together and held it firmly. Arjun put extra pressure on my fingertips.

“Aah, bas!” I screamed.

An employee with the nylon cable locks and stickers came close to us. “Shor kam kijiye.” (Make less noise) He put another sticker. Arjun snatched some stickers from him and decoratively covered the zip. “Why are you being a miser bhai?” he said.

Suddenly, he turned to me and grabbed his jeans. He pulled up his jeans and ripped off a band-aid from his leg. He put that band-aid on the edge of the bag which looked lucrative for theft.

“Do you have more?” he asked me.

I searched my medical kit in the corner of my other luggage. Luckily, there were a few band-aids. We ripped the paper off one by one dramatically and covered the zip artfully. My baggage was now out of danger. The operation was successful, kind of.

I collected the paper scrap from the floor and tucked it in the empty side pocket of Arjun’s bag. He was too busy examining my bag to notice my mischief. “Thank you,” I said as he looked at me.

“Not the best idea though.”

“True. Let’s hope they allow this as hand baggage.”

“Are you sure you’ll be able to carry a wounded body on your own?”

“Sure. Still better than getting stolen.”

“Don’t worry. Leave that to me.” His overconfident ass was doing that thing again.

While we were standing in the queue, he asked, “So, was it like this when you brought it?”

I looked at him. My lips pressed hard to control a laugh. “It’s actually my fault,” I said. I narrowed my eyes in guilt. I gestured for him to come a little closer and whispered.

When I had entered the airport, my baggage was in perfect health.

As I nervously searched for the baggage drop-in, I felt my stomach curl. I held it tightly and with the other hand, I grabbed my luggage as I could feel the cramps surge. “Must have overflown,” I said to myself. That was why I always wanted to shift to environment-friendly menstrual cups, but Indian moms fear it would break your hymen.

My trolley luggage was tiny and manageable but this huge oval bag definitely wouldn’t fit with the commode while I peed. I kept my baby purse on my small trolley and mounted the huge one on my shoulder.

As I entered the washroom, a sweeper had mopped the floor. The restroom wasn’t crowded but the fear of theft was still a constant. Fear is a family inherited disease. After all, it was the second time I was travelling alone. The first time was when I arrived for this workshop.

I thought what would my mother do. When we travelled by train, my mother used to tie the luggage with chains to our seats. I could definitely tie my luggage to myself. But I didn’t have a dupatta. Instead, I lifted my kameez and took the one end of my long drawstring, and pulled it through one of the zips of my blue bag. I took the trolley bag, the purse, the zip-string with me inside.

I struggled to change such that the drawstring didn’t hide from the other end. Imagine holding the period cum zip-string the entire time. My pad had indeed been overflown. When I thought that I had done changing, I opened the door finally to tie my drawstrings back together.

But I was careless on the longer end of the drawstring. I pulled it so hard that the zip broke from the tip into half. I could hear the zip open such that I struggled to fix it up till the moment Arjun operated on it with band-aids. The small metallic broken piece was still in their dustbin, making me realise not to be clumsy and put too much pressure on zips and shells of half-boiled eggs ever again – they break and create mess worth hours.

Arjun looked at me, amused. I wasn’t sure if it was decent of a young girl to tell a man double her age her toilet chronicles which involved periods. Was he bored? To my surprise, he burst out laughing. I noticed how his ears always turned crimson red when he laughed too loud. Always, as in our journey-ship. He had a peculiar laugh which made him sound like he was sobbing after a while. The sobbing sound did draw a few eyes if not the laugh.

“You’re from that movie – the one where you play the ghost!” a person said from the queue as he walked up to Arjun.

“Ghost?” Arjun stood confused. “Oh, Ghost writer. I play a cameo. The movie is based on my book.”

“Yes, but you were in that movie, right?”

“Yes…”

“Can I please take a picture…”

The staff directed me to an empty counter to check in my baggage.

“No, sorry. I am not an actor. People from media are both horny and dumb. I am neither,” Arjun said, in a polite but stern tone.

Arjun followed me. The woman at the counter greeted me and asked me for my ID proof.

“Two passengers travelling?” she asked.

“No, it’s just me.”

“Sir, if you could please step aside.”

“Ma’am, I am a guardian,” he said, keeping my bag on the belt. “If you could please allow this as a handbag. As you can see, it’s pretty messed up.”

“Sorry, sir. The luggage weighs 8.6 kgs and looks too big. This has to go in check-in.”

Arjun leaned on the counter. “Please, ma’am. I’m sure you know who I am. You can do this for me.”

“I’m sorry sir, I don’t.”

“Oh, you don’t read books?”

“No, sir.”

I saw the conversation deviating as my boarding was being announced. “Ma’am,” I said, “The bag has my grandfather’s coats who recently passed away. It’s expensive and more so because of the huge sentimental value attached to it. Most of these clothes were gifted to my grandparents by my mother. Now that my Nani is a widow, she has nowhere to wear these gorgeous saris either. It won’t be easy for me to carry this weight, but imagine if even one gets stolen, I’ll have to carry its weight forever. So, if you could please accept the trolly in check-in and allow this to me?”

Arjun and the woman looked at me like I had won their hearts. “Let me check,” the woman said as she walked to the corner of the row of desks. She came back with a man accompanying her. “You can take this as hand baggage,” the kind woman agreed. The man behind her nodded. She pasted the baggage tag on the trolley luggage and placed it on the belt. I looked at Arjun who was still looking at me gently like he had temporarily eaten up his box of poor jokes. I smiled, pressing my lips. Was this a goodbye? That’s what I had thought when I shook his hand on the last day of the workshop. I remember I had asked, “What if I wish to talk or take your feedback?”


He had said then, “I am very picky about what I read. It’s my diet. You might write something that I may not like, but others may love it. Don’t take feedback. If Fyodor Dostoyevsky listened to his father, Crime and Punishment would be eaten by cockroaches in a dustbin.”

Arjun snapped his fingers before me. He handed me my ID proof that the woman had returned. “Let’s go, shall we?”

“So, you will stand in a queue again?”

“I guess, yes,” Arjun said.

As we turned back, a male voice called us, “Excuse me.” It was the man who had accompanied the woman to the counter. “Can you please weigh your bag again?”

My heart had almost stopped beating. Arjun helped me keep the bag on the scale. The man examined the poor condition of the luggage. “Could you please follow me? Please wear your masks.”

Arjun saw the obvious anxiety on my face as I covered it. My hand shivered as I felt the cold embodying me yet again. His warm hands held mine. I looked at him. He tilted his head and closed his eyes, gesturing everything was fine. My anxiety was obvious because this was the only bag that I did not pack.


We entered a small cabin and waited for the man to arrive. He returned. Not alone, with a big brown tape! “Here, this should help.” I stared at it with my lip half parted. As I allowed the feeling to sink in, I looked at Arjun and heaved a sigh of relief.

We took the brown tape and covered it over the parted chain. The tape, again, was not the best, but far better from band-aids. Once done, I lifted the bag on my back and smiled. The task seemed much easier now, though the weight of the tape added to the discomfort.


I thanked the man. Arjun grabbed a bottle of water and sat down, tired. SPLASH!! I turned behind. Much like the chai, Arjun had drenched his jacket with water as he forgot to remove his mask before drinking.

I passed over my handkerchief (I literally had everything except what was necessary). As he wiped his face, I took a picture stealthily and posted it on my Instagram story tagging him.


He pulled out another mask from his bag and I noticed it was the one that I had gifted him. “This is the one-”

“You gave…” he completed my sentence. Did he actually remember or was it because I almost reminded him? He tucked the wet mask in the side pocket when he noticed the band-aid scraps.

This is the last and final call for passengers boarding flight 6E 2841 to Kolkata…

Before Arjun could say anything, I was gone. A notification popped on my phone - Arjun liked your story mention.


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